Continuing my journey into foreign film, I rented from Blockbuster Vive L'Amour and Amelie, and watched them this past Friday and Saturday.
Vive L'Amour was filmed in 1994. It won the Venice Film Festival - I can see why. It'd fit perfectly with the drab, bitter irony popular in the Nineties. Apart from bringing me back to days when I'd go with friends to the trendy Cedar Lee art theater in Cleveland - a double-feature of Pi and Your Friends and Neighbors comes to mind - the movie drew out of me a grand total of two chuckles, zero pulled heartstrings and one ejection of the DVD long before credits rolled. Live by PoMo, die by PoMo.
Amelie was much better, the work of French visual genius Jean-Pierre Jeunet. His latest American flick was horror but he's probably best known for powerfully constructed, grotesque whimsy, City of Lost Children the most popular. The premise? Parisian girl with odd childhood grows up into eccentric young woman who, by sheer coincidence, dedicates several weeks of her life to benevolence towards city regulars. Her philanthropic exploits are staggered with a romance arc: she finds love, loses love, tracks love into a smut shop, loses love in near-misses several times before finally bumping into love, making love to love, and leaving the audience with a saccharine Happily Ever After.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet proved two points with Amelie: first, the French are worth their weight in artistic achievement (if not for responsible world leadership). Second, too much artistic achivement - the whimsy Jeunet is famous for, the fun - can spoil everything. I happened to find a film reviewer who understood. He enjoyed the movie, but didn't labor under any delusions as to what it was:
Although Jeunet has largely retreated from the grotesqueries of "Delicatessen" and "City of Lost Children" (both of which he co-directed with Marc Caro), "Amelie" remains a highlight reel of gorgeous production design and out-there photographic effects. Its whimsical, free-ranging nature is often enchanting; the first hour, in particular, is brimming with amiable, sardonic laughs. But there comes a point where you feel like Jeunet is forcing whimsy down your throat with a plunger. Like Terry Gilliam - who helped get "Delicatessen" released in America - he's almost too imaginative for his own good.
That point was about ninety minutes into the movie - kind of like the celebrated twelfth generous portion of cake. Your demeanor goes from amused to confused, to impatient to claustrophobic. Put down. The magic. Wand.
If Jeunet were a lot more judicious with his camera theatrics and could occasionally stop being so damned oblique, "Amelie" would be a cockeyed masterpiece, something on the order of Jaco van Dormael's lovely "Toto le Hero." But the obvious amount of work that went into every single sound and image makes this an absurdly labor-intensive piece of fluff.
Watching French art cinema is like catching a man, colorfully dressed as a jester, just before he tosses a dozen juggling objects into the air. Up they go; down they fall, and tumble everywhere in a mess. The guy can’t even juggle. But what a spectacle, huh? Credits.
Though playful, "Amelie" contains more than a few dark moments. There's also a couple of overt sex scenes and several instances of nudity.
Another observation. Ever notice how European film operates under the assumption that explicit representation of sex and/or use of the restroom qualifies them to certain artistic values - that somehow the movies are made more real, or gritty, or honest? It seems the more independent the movie, the more one can expect the director to concentrate on depictions of sex and/or use of the restroom. Somewhere along the way, of course, is the line between authentic and bizarre. Do European audiences enjoy this? - discovering a cinematic touch to relieving oneself, I mean. Realism is one thing, obsessions are another (and we wonder why the Continent no longer leads the world).
Thankfully, only one of the three Jeunet movies I've seen only slightly followed this trend. Alien: Resurrection is too Americanized to be of any controversy (other than enough violence to actually blur into tedium); City of Lost Children is so much a children's movie that it couldn't afford to; and Amelie's one-liner treatments of sex are about as brash as they are brief. With a laissez-faire smirk patented in Paris, Jeunet uses one shot to establish Amelie's bad luck with love, and a short sequence to satisfy the European audience niche I've just described. Who cares how many couples are experiencing epiphany in Jeunet's constructed Paris? Those people do. But then we're back to the plot.
Idiosyncracies aside, Jeunet is brilliant with a masterful crew beside him:
Note that cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel is dabbling in genius territory. At the very least, he deserves an Oscar nomination.
The movie had barely begun, and I was already marveling at the camera's mastery. A straight shot here, jiggling a bit there, film sped up and pulled back with the perfect touch of rhythm that Busta Rhymes’ videos always chased after - but sadly, fisheye lens notwithstanding, never found. With such a millimeter-thin line between cinematography that attracts your attention because it's brilliant and cinematography that's distracting because it's pretentious, Bruno Delbonnel deserves a round of applause even today - and a survey of the other work he's done. Second only to technique was craftsmanship of the film itself; I can't recall watching a recent movie with a crisper picture that still held such driven color saturation.
Another observation: can you find me a recent Jeunet movie without actor Dominique Pinon? You might as well find a recent Lucas movie without Warwick Davis. Speaking of the Hughes-like rancher, if you can find a decent Lucas production made since Jedi with Warwick Davis, you win a blue ribbon. Or, I suppose, a movie to watch.
You can't blame the French for being self-indulgent, especially when the result is worth the effort. Amelie is good work by Jeunet who, along with Sabine Herold, helps keep the poor, aimless Gauls relevant. (And Paris attractive. If that aging city looked anything like it did in Jeunet's fairy tale, Jacques Chirac would be one happy, boycott-free bum.)